FxCop Honored with Chairman's Award for Engineering Excellence

FxCop Honored with Chairman's Award for Engineering Excellence

Every year, Microsoft honors a few innovations that have furthered the state of engineering excellence at Microsoft... Some years, Bill Gates selects one of the winners to honor with the special distinction of the chairman's award. I am told that Bill does this for truly noteworthy achievements that have tangible impacted software development in every division at Microsoft. In fact, until this year, the only other winner of the Chairman's award was Watson.

This year, FxCop (along with some two other static code analysts tools) were selected for this award. This achievement is a testament to the importance of catching errors at the developers desktop before they even get into the source tree. We know it becomes orders of magnitude more expensive to catch errors once checked in, and even harder still once they have shipped. FxCop (and similar tools) enable developers to quickly and reliably scan their code against all known issues. This type of checks is a scalable and reliable way to catch whole classes of issues. As new classes of issues are found, a new "rule" can be written and codebases across Microsoft (and the industry) can be quickly checked for that class of issue. If you are not using a tool such as FxCop today, you should!

FxCop is available standalone for anyone inside or outside of Microsoft to get as well as an integral part of Visual Studio 2005 and beyond.

While Krzysztof Cwalina, Michael Fanning and I were honored to accept the award and get a nice hand shake and photo will BillG, there are tons of people that made FxCop successful. While I can't claim this is a complete list of those that played key roles, it is a good start. Thanks for all of you that helped!

plus: Every engineer and customer who contributed thinking and feedback to the Framework Design Guidelines, provided useful feedback and bug reports to the FxCop team, or simply objected to the sanctioned casing of the term ‘Id’. Your numbers are legion.